Uninhabited or unmanned aerial vehicles have been in use for several years for various purposes including carrying sensors, reconnaissance, and communications. Some unmanned vehicles are useful for flying into areas in which a manned aircraft would be at risk due to enemy fire, airborne contaminants, and other dangers.
In the mid 1990's, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) began funding development of micro-air vehicles. Some examples of micro aerial vehicles are found in U.S. Pat. No. 6,959,989 to Cylinder, U.S. Pat. No. 6,626,398 to Cox et al., and in U.S. Pat. No. 6,082,671 to Michelson.
Examples of small propeller driven flying devices are found in “The NRL MITE Air Vehicle”, Proceedings of the Bristol RPV/AUV Systems Conference, 2001, by Kellogg, J. et. al., the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
Some other examples of small unmanned vehicles are disclosed in “Nonconventional Aerodynamics for Micro-UAVs”, Proc. 16th International UAV Systems Conference, Bristol, UK, April 2001 by Kellogg, J. et al. and in “Development and Testing of Unconventional Micro Air Vehicle Configurations”, Proc. of Unmanned/Unlimited Conference, AIAA, September 2003 by Kellogg, J. et al., each of which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
Further description of micro-air vehicles, including several stop-rotor converting type micro-air vehicles, is found in “Design and Development of the Samara Stop-Rotor Hybrid Micro Air Vehicle”, Proc. 20th International UAV Systems Conference, Bristol, UK, April 2005, by James C. Kellogg, Richard I. Foch, Aaron D. Kahn, Michael Baur, Donald Srull, David A. Cylinder, and George Piper.